Biology of Memory

Novel stimulus information, which is known to have been responded to (perceived), suffers a rapid decrease in recallability over the first 30 sec. filled with rehearsal-preventing activity. With increased duration or frequency of the original presentation, short-term memory (STM) for such novel information shows marked improvement, with perfect recognition and complete recall after very long periods of time as the limit (LTM). In spite of this apparent continuity of STM and LTM, some behavior theorists assume that two mechanisms with different characteristics are involved in STM and LTM; others assume that the processes involved in STM are qualitatively the same as those involved in LTM.